Customer experience (CX) is more than just how you interact with your customers; it’s also how your customers perceive your brand. For developing an effective customer experience strategy that will entice customers to work with you, we would need:
1. Customer- centricity
Create your customer experience strategy based on the needs of your customers and the market. Learn everything you can about your customers. Understand what drives their purchasing decisions and keeps them loyal to your brand and personalise your customer experience to bring those elements to the forefront. The idea is to develop personas based on your target audience will help you better recognize the customer psyche and build experiences that are customized and strategic in nature. Once you have a thorough understanding of your customers, you can begin mapping the customer journey based on how they interact with your brand.
It’s also important to learn about your customers’ goals as part of this and at the same develop an understanding of customers’ success criteria. “Ask yourself, ‘What does the customer need to say about your solution for them to become an advocate?’”
2. Allow your customers’ needs to guide your organization goals and objectives
A worthy goal for any organisation is to provide positive customer experiences. But how do you know what that means for your company? Once you have a deep understanding your customers, work to align their objectives with your own. Reconsider your company’s mission, values, objectives, and processes. A successful CX strategy must be closely aligned with the entire business ecosystem. Meeting your customers’ needs may also entail assisting them in locating the information they require as their relationship with you grows. Enabling customers to easily find the right content at the right time in the customer journey, along with content intelligence to measure customer engagement and intent to buy more from your business, should be a key priority of any CX strategy.
3.Evaluate and Consider key players’ input
Customer experience doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and neither should the process of developing a strategy. To create a truly connected customer experience, ensure that everyone in your organisation who contributes to customer touchpoints, such as marketing, sales, commerce, and service, is on board and working toward the same goals and objectives.
4.Ensure your customer experience strategy allows for the appropriate processes:
A robust strategy includes processes that help you improve the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle. The framework of customer experience strategy is developed on three core pillars are the key here – characterize /attract/engage—both in terms of process perspective and technology that falls into these buckets
- Characterize: Prepare a strategy for researching personas and analysing customer data to better understand how to connect with prospective customers.
- Attract: To draw customers towards your brand, create targeted messaging and offers.
- Engage: Use email automation, chat, and other technologies across multiple channels to interact with and support customers at every stage of the process.
5. Use the best tools and resources to back up your strategy
You’ve established the processes; now ensure you have the resources to support them. Not sure where to begin? Gather unidentified user data in a customer data platform and map it into your customer relationship management solution to ensure that every interaction is data-driven and personalized. Leverage content management system to consolidate information and make it easier for customers to find relevant information. Incorporate an email marketing automation tool to connect customers with relevant information and offers at key phases of their experience.
When you understand your customers, align your business objectives to their needs, and collaborate with key stakeholders across your organization – you can develop an effective customer experience strategy. Having the right processes in place, as well as the tools and systems to support them, assist you in providing a consistent, positive customer experience.
(The author is Mr. Rakesh Jaitly, Senior Sales Director, Oracle Applications and the views expressed in this article are his own)
